From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
To: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Cc: Emeric Fermas <emeric.fermas@gmail.com>,
Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>,
git@vger.kernel.org, Vicent Marti <tanoku@gmail.com>,
libgit2@librelist.com
Subject: Re: What's the definition of a valid Git symbolic reference?
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:09:39 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20110215070939.GB28634@sigill.intra.peff.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7vsjvpq0jk.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 10:22:55PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Emeric Fermas <emeric.fermas@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Once again, by reading at the code I can understand how those commands
> > currently work. What I'm trying to achieve is to understand what
> > should be their recommended usage.
>
> There are only two valid kinds of symrefs right now:
>
> - .git/HEAD, pointing at somewhere under refs/heads/ hierarchy;
>
> - .git/refs/remotes/<some remote name>/HEAD, pointing at somewhere under
> refs/remotes/<the same remote name>/ hierarchy.
Nit: the notes merge code uses NOTES_MERGE_REF as a symref to a notes
ref. See the create_symref call in builtin/notes.c.
I don't think that changes your point much, though.
> The code may be prepared to resolve recursive symrefs, symrefs other than
> the above two kinds, symrefs that point at elsewhere, but all of them are
> outside of the design scope of what the mechanism was intended to support.
> What the code do to them (without crashing) is not the design, but simply
> an undefined behaviour.
I was always under the impression that you could generally use symbolic
refs to point wherever you wanted inside the refs hierarchy as a
replacement for symlinks (I don't know how the latter would deal with
ref packing, though). But I think that was just my assumption rather
than anything that was ever communicated officially.
-Peff
prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-02-15 7:09 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-02-14 20:58 What's the definition of a valid Git symbolic reference? Emeric Fermas
2011-02-15 3:19 ` Kevin Ballard
2011-02-15 3:49 ` Emeric Fermas
2011-02-15 5:02 ` Tomas Carnecky
2011-02-19 13:10 ` Kevin P. Fleming
2011-02-15 6:22 ` Junio C Hamano
2011-02-15 6:32 ` Emeric Fermas
2011-02-15 7:09 ` Jeff King [this message]
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